Landscape #5: Enabling the Bio-Economy
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By:
Alix Ventures: Supporting Early Stage Life Science Startups Engineering Biology to Drive Radical Advances in Human Health
Overview
The 21st century will be an era defined by biological revolution. Intense progress will be made in manipulating biological building blocks to engineer therapeutics and cure disease. Gene therapies, RNA therapies, cell therapies, and the entire new generation of engineered biological therapeutics have brought on a new age in biopharma. For the first time, therapies are engineered rather than discovered, and at the heart of this has been rapid improvements in our understanding of biological building blocks: DNA, RNA, proteins, etc.
Our current biological infrastructure is reminiscent of the early days of computers. The common comparison between biology and computer hardware has been Moore’s law: the observation that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles about every two years, though the cost of computers is halved. We often note how in biology, DNA sequencing has outpaced Moore’s law, yet the cost of bringing a drug to market is the inverse of Moore’s law (ie. getting more and more expensive over time).
The critical factors behind the rapid development of computer hardware and software have been outsourcing, unbundling the production stack , and specialization of labor. APIs are the backbone of the software industry & in hardware computers have long been plug & play, taking chips from a variety of manufacturers to create the sum total product for the consumer.
With any technology or engineering breakthrough, the final product is always a result of outsourcing and specialization of labor, and biopharma is no exception. While this traditionally has been in the form of CROs, the new biological stack requires more. We are still at the early stages of functionally engineering biology through means such as reading, writing, and editing. Synthetic & data driven approaches to biology have necessitated large scale testing and experimentation at an unprecedented scale. Faster, less expensive, more accurate biomanufacturing would dramatically increase the rate at which researchers can design, build, test, & iterate biological systems. Thus accelerating development of vaccines, gene and cell therapies, molecular engineering, and cloning, with practical applications translating to a wide variety of industries such as drug discovery, pharmaceuticals, food & agriculture, chemicals, & energy production.
At Alix Ventures, we believe that the biological revolution is here & to support the rapid expansion of research & development, one thesis we are particularly excited to invest in is what we call the “Biological API Layer”— service & infrastructure technology enabling the bio-economy.